Made it through the storm

We survived and made it through the storm.

The weekend storm is now the largest single snowfall event on record for the Baltimore area. The only time we have had it worse was the back to back snow storms in 2010. What made it worse was that it was one right after the other, but still not the amount of snow we received this time.. Like many around us, I spent yesterday digging out for 6+ hours just to get my 100 feet of driveway clear and unbury the cars. We got lucky in that a neighbor’s son who had a plow on his truck cleared our spur of the road and another neighbor had already cleared the main private road out to the county road.

Thank goodness I bought a snow blower a few years back or I think I would still be out there and very sore instead of just a little sore and stiff. I’m still recovering from all the exercise today though with sore muscle that haven’t seen that much use in a while. Despite all the work it takes to clear it, it was a beautiful sight to see everything covered in snow there for a while.

The beauty of the snow

20160124-DSC_3252

The scene outside out house before we got to clearing the road. Yes our road is buried in there between the stake and the pine trees. Now that things are cleared and all the snow is piled up it doesn’t look so pretty.

I was hoping to get another series of photos with the snow on the trees, but by the time we got things cleared out enough the snow had fallen off the trees. It was just way to deep for me to walk in before so I wasn’t able to get the entire tree line as I’ve done in the past like I had hoped to. Also, the snow was only on the south side of the trees this time. During the storm the high winds from the north kept the snow from sticking to the north side of the trees.

A tip when taking pictures of snow

I learned over time from various web sources that when you are photographing snow you should slightly overexpose your photo. The thinking behind it make sense to me in that all the snow glare is making your sensor think it is much brighter than it actually is and thus it is setting your f-stop higher that you want it to be, an Aperture of f11 instead of f8 for example. Since the f-stop is higher it is letting is less light and as a result you will get dull looking snow instead of the crisp white snow that you see. For the above picture I over exposed my photo by 1 f-stop. It is straight out of the camera untouched.

Here is a photo I took back during the 2010 storm before I figured out this tip. And you can see how dull it looks. Granted it was cloudy in this picture but it was still very bright outside at the time.

DSC_0173 - 2010-02-06 at 14-48-03

#Storm #Snow #Snowmagedon #WinterStormJonas


The calm after the storm

Well looks like most of the forecasts were a little off on the snow totals, which is fine by me. The lower snow amount meant less time spent cleaning up.

Not looking forward to the cold temps that are coming tonight though. Spring begins this month, but from the weather we have had lately I think it is going to be a bit late.

We did get a nice sunset over the fresh snow cover we got today.

Here is a shot from my cell phone.

The calm after the storm

Winter just won’t quit here in Maryland

We are preparing for another round of winter weather here in the Mid-Atlantic area.

But it seems that no one can agree on how much we are going to get.  Below is snow predictions from 3 sources, Justin Berk, who does his own weather forecasting for Just in Weather #faithintheflakes  and the other 2 are local tv stations in Baltimore.

Will be interesting to see who was right. My point in all this is Mother Nature is Mother Nature, no matter how much we think we can predict her, until she does her damage, we just don’t know.

These predictions are from the 11pm news on 3/2, about 24 hours before the storm.

March 3rd Snow Preditions